Provisioning High-Precision Clock Synchronization Between UAVs for Low Latency Networks

Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), require low-latency control for accurate mission execution and automation in vehicular or industrial applications. To facilitate clock synchronization in ensuring low-latency performance for UAVs, we propose the Mobile Edge Clock Server (MECS), a software-based timestamping mechanism tailored for UAVs, by modifying the poll process in Network Time Protocol (NTP) and merging GPS signal resources. Through the application of the Raw-offset filter, we also propose precise MECS (P-MECS), aimed at achieving high precision by considering the characteristics of GPS modules and conducting an in-depth analysis of signals. The MECS and P-MECS resulted in improving clock accuracy and reducing inter-UAV synchronization error to 1/129 (99.2%) and 1/19,402 (99.99%), respectively, compared to NTP on WLAN, and to 1/32 (96.9%) and 1/4,762 (99.98%), respectively, compared to Chrony on WLAN.